Investor's Business Daily: "The CRU's Criminal Conspiracy"

ClimateGate: Britain's Climate Research Unit now says it will release all its data. Does that include the data that have been shredded, deleted and denied publication?

In a statement released Saturday by the University of East Anglia, where the CRU is located, it was announced that all unit data, including data that had been denied climate skeptics, would soon be released to prove this is much ado about nothing.

Unimpressed by the news is David Holland of Northampton, a grandfather with a background in electrical engineering, who is seeking prosecution of the CRU scientists involved in suppressing and even destroying climate data in violation of Britain's information disclosure laws.

Mr. Holland filed a complaint with the Information Commissioner's Office last week after the leaked e-mails included several Freedom of Information requests he himself had submitted to the CRU, requests that went nowhere, and the CRU scientists' private responses to them.

In one e-mail dated May 26, 2008, one CRU scientist writes to a colleague who received one of Mr. Holland's requests: "Oh MAN! Will this crap never end?" Not only is it not about to end, it is hitting the fan as we speak.

The CRU scientists, and we use that word reluctantly, had no fondness for transparency and full disclosure. In a December 2008 e-mail to Ben Santer, himself responsible for a controversial rewriting of the 1995 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, CRU director Phil Jones wrote: "When the FOI requests began here, the FOI person said we had to abide by the requests. It took a couple of half-hour sessions -- one at a screen, to convince them otherwise."

In regard to one particularly pesky FOI request, Jones said: "About 2 months ago I deleted loads of e-mails, so have very little -- if anything at all." Yet in an interview published last Tuesday in the Guardian, Jones told another story: "We've not deleted any e-mails or data here at CRU. I would never manipulate the data one bit -- I would categorically deny that."

In one exchange, Jones tells Penn State's Michael Mann: "If they ever hear there's a Freedom of Information Act in the U.K., I think I'll delete the file rather than send to anyone." He even asks Mann to join him in deleting e-mail exchanges about an IPCC assessment report: "Can you delete any e-mails you may have had with Keith re: (the IPCC's Fourth Assessment Report)?"
So much has been deleted that it may be impossible to release all the data and reveal the tangled web of manipulation. Scientists at the University of East Anglia have admitted throwing away much of the raw temperature data on which their predictions of global warming are based.

In a statement on its Web site, the CRU said: "We do not hold the original raw data but only the value-added (quality-controlled and homogenized) data." In other words, only the manipulated and doctored data are available.

Roger Pielke, professor of environmental studies at Colorado University, discovered data had been lost when he asked for original records. "The CRU is basically saying, 'Trust us.' So much for settling questions and resolving debates with science," he said.

Jones and his ilk even went so far as to seek suppression of contrarian evidence in those much beloved "peer-reviewed" journals. When Climate Research published a skeptic's paper, Jones demanded the journal "rid itself of this troublesome editor."

Regarding another set of Gore disbelievers, Jones assured Dr. Mann, "I can't see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow -- even if we have to redefine what the peer-reviewed literature is!"

This is not consensus, nor is it peer-reviewed science. This is collusion and conspiracy to defraud, not only those providing grant money and research funding, but governments and taxpayers, particularly our own, of trillions of dollars to mindlessly pursue the greatest scam of the century, perhaps of all time. These charlatans deserve to be locked up.

In my view, there's an even bigger scandal underlying ClimateGate: the response of the science community and blogsphere has been muted and even exculpatory. Why? Perhaps it's because ClimateGate is the way a lot of science is done, and many scientists see nothing wrong with it.